Post on Wednesday November, 5th

Hello everyone!!! What a busy week or so since I last had a chance to write or post anything on this site! We found out our posts this week and I am currently on "site visit" at my post right now. I am in a town called Banyo which is in the Adawama province-it is a lot different than where I was the past month or so. It is further south and much more mountainous and cooler (I actually used a blanket last night). You should be able to find it on a map of Cameroon-it is due east from a town called Tibati and sort of northeast of a town called Bafoussam. I am staying with the girl who has been here for the past two years-her name is Nadia and she is really great. I have taken lots of photos of the house and town and will post them next week when I can. I posted a few photos below from the last week's bike ride and my celebration after the U of M loss!!

I am posted to be working with the local district hospital here in Banyo and my counterpart is the head nurse who is originally from the western part of Cameroon. There is a new doctor there and Nadia says he has really got the place in shape since his arrival last year so it sounds like I should be in a good spot to be working on a lot of things in Banyo and the surrounding villages. During the last two years, Nadia has been working on training nurses, working with a men's group, working with neighborhood children, and also working with prisoners and improving the conditions there. Hopefully I will be able to continue some of her work after she leaves. Banyo is a really pretty town. It is approx. 25,000 people and a medium sized town in a hilly area (lots of climbing!). There is one main stretch of town that is is paved and has shops and such and then there are some schools and health clinics on the out skirts-the rest is all residential neighborhoods. Great news thought-they are currently building a bakery and small supermarket which should be completed in the next few months. My house has a big living room, a smaller kitchen that overlooks the hills with a back yard, a bathroom, and THREE bed rooms!!! There is a lot of painting and decorating that will need to happen once I move here officially in December but it should work out (right now most of the walls are painted Bright pink!) One of the draw backs to living here is that I am really isolated from my other health and Agro volunteers that I came in with. I do have a post mate who is a high school teacher here and will be here for most of my time here and there is another health volunteer who has been here for a year that is apparently an hour east of me. There are three other health volunteers I know posted in Adawama but Jessie and Brian are about 5 hours west of me and I don't even know how far away Allison is in the east!! Lets just say the roads are pretty incredible. To get here, we all took a 5 hour bus ride and spent the night with other volunteers in N'Gaoundere which is the provincial capitol of Adawama. The next morning we started at 7 am for Tibati and arrived there at 3 pm in the afternoon. And then I continue on from there for another 5 hours or so! Things didn't go exactly to plan so I didn't arrive until Tuesday morning!!! GEESH! It took three days to get here! I don't think I will be visiting the north much after this! I am going to take it in 3 steps to get back to out training site this weekend so it shouldn't be as bad! Ahhh..travel in Cameroon!

So I hope everyone is doing well! Such great news on the elections!!!! Please send any news you have!! Hope to write back soon with more photos-miss you all, love, Anna